[NLA] ] a proposal to "save" the NIFL

[Thomas Sticht]

The Basic Skills Agency (BSA) in the UK and the National Institute for
Literacy (NIFL) in the US: Parallels in Transforming From an Adult
to a Life Span Literacy Education Focus

Tom Sticht

In 1976 the community-based, charitable, British Association of
Settlements Literacy Project in the United Kingdom merged with a
government-funded Adult Literacy Resource Agency. By 1980, this
private/government agency had become the quasi-governmental, but still
public charitable trust called the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit
(ALBSU).  ALBSU focussed upon adult literacy and basic skills work
exclusively up until around 1992, which is the year I first began to work
with the agency on family literacy. From then on ALBSU has worked not only
on adult literacy but also family literacy which involved working with
children’s literacy development, too. By 1996, ALBSU had changed its name
to the Basic Skills Agency and was engaged in promoting children’s
literacy development not only in family literacy programs but in primary
school contexts as well. When the UK initiated its national literacy
initiative in the late 1990s, the BSA was an integral part of the planning
and work on literacy across the life span. Though the BSA is still an
independent charitable trust, it receives the bulk of its funding from the
government. It has demonstrated that an organisation that for many years
was strictly focused upon adult literacy and basic skills development
could successfully switch to a life span, "womb to tomb" approach to basic
skills development and maintain a high degree of excellence in its work.

It is my understanding that the ALBSU served somewhat as a model for those
thinking about getting a national institute for adult literacy created
under the National Literacy Act of 1991. The idea was to create a
quasi-governmental agency that would focus upon adult literacy education.
In its realisation, the National Institute for Literacy, though referred
to as an "independent" federal agency was never the quasi-governmental
agency that ALBSU (later the BSA) was/is. Further, it never had the
resources, based on the relative differences in size between the UK and
the US, that the ALBSU/BSA had and has. It also had no history of actually
arising from the
field and employing mostly a Director and staff that had started as adult
literacy educators and worked their way up into leadership in the nation’s
adult education and literacy system.

Interestingly, the first permanent Director of the NIFL had his adult
literacy experience as a government policy worker in writing the Even
Start legislation, which immediately brought together adult and childhood
literacy development. So at the very beginning of the NIFL, there was an
interest in family literacy and that necessarily meant an interest in
children’s literacy. This was the same situation that the ALBSU/BSA found
itself in in the mid-1990s that ultimately lead to its getting deeply
involved in children’s literacy in addition to its original focus upon
adult literacy. But unlike the BSA, the NIFL never experienced a time when
it was not focused to some degree upon children’s literacy in the form of
family literacy efforts.

Today, following the path taken by the ALBSU/BSA after 1992, the NIFL has a
lifelong education and learning mission which includes adult literacy, 
family literacy, and  children’s literacy. In the US federal government
today, only the Division of Adult Education and Literacy in the Department
of Education has an exclusive focus upon adult adult education and
literacy.




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